Monthly Archives: April 2014

I’ve got a simple tip today for anyone who sends email newsletters. Here it is: Put lots of links in your email. The reason? People don’t take action unless they’re told what action to take. They won’t visit your website unless you tell them that they should visit your website. When you publish an article,…

How do I know if my newsletter is working? That was the question I got from a client yesterday. It’s an important question – not just for your newsletters but for any marketing you do. A lot of people make the mistake of guessing, which results in a lot of wrong decisions…and wrong decisions don’t…

On Friday I told you about the newsletter that is inserted into egg boxes. It’s one of my favorite newsletter concepts of all time. That newsletter is what I call a “ride-along” newsletter because it comes inserted with a product. It’s a good idea because the cost of mailing printed newsletters puts some people off.…

Back in 2009, I wrote about The Country Hen and its newsletter. You might have bought some of this company’s eggs. The box has a little newsletter in it. Now, I don’t know of any other grocery products that come with their own newsletter, so this one really stands out. The newsletter is not big…probably…

I was hosting the breakfast show at the local community radio station yesterday. For those of you who are new here – it’s a voluntary position. This isn’t Sirius or NPR. I’m just happy if I don’t have five minutes of dead air. So many buttons and so many potential mistakes. But anyway. Doing radio…

A few years ago, a friend (no, it wasn’t me) decided he needed a wife. So he went online dating. Now…this guy is a statistician, so he took the whole process very seriously. He even created a spreadsheet. And because he is a statistician, he calculated exactly how many women he would need to contact,…

I got home from a trip away yesterday and found my basement flooded. Yay! Spring is here and the snow is melting! Three hours with the Shop-Vac later and it’s still damp. Anyway… Why am I telling you this? Well, there are three reasons. First, telling this story illustrates a point I make frequently: your…

Yesterday, I stood for two minutes and felt the wind on my face. How often is it that any of us stop and do that? We’re so busy doing “stuff” that we forget the simple things in life; things that can give us the most pleasure. There’s a simple lesson here. Recently I read the…

Every day in the Indian city of Mumbai, 200,000 lunches are picked up from office workers’ homes and delivered to the workers’ desks precisely at lunchtime. Then in the afternoon, the whole thing is reversed, with the empty boxes (called tiffin boxes) returned to the workers’ homes in the afternoon. And here’s the amazing thing.…

It’s not “what you sell” that matters.It’s not you as a “real estate agent” that matters.Instead…it’s all the stuff that surrounds it. Let me explain. Here at Ready to Go Newsletters, we sell newsletters. But that’s not what matters. Yesterday Mayna, our long-suffering customer support manager (I say long-suffering because she works hard and has…

Today, as you know, is the mother of all deadlines. I’m sorry for reminding you so early in the morning, but today is tax day. Urgh. Deadlines – nothing like them to concentrate the mind, is there? If you were like many people, you were rushing to beat the deadline or ask for an extension.…

Have you ever seen a duck trying to take off from a swimming pool? (Let’s not ask why the duck was there in the first place – I guess the 85 degree clear water was a better choice than a muddy pond.) The duck uses a lot of energy to get airborne. It’s first few…

I was emailing with a potential client, a real estate agent in California, this week. She had responded to one of these messages – the one I sent on Monday about the danger of talking AT your clients. She agreed with the main message in the email, but she asked: what kind of things should…

Sometimes, amid the day-to-day hassle of business, it’s easy to forget what really matters.Whole days go by while you are fighting fires and sweating the small stuff. You’re busy on listings presentations, showing homes and solving problems.And on days like that, you can forget WHY you are doing what you doing.So sometimes, it pays to…

A few years ago, when newspapers realized that Google News and Craig’s List were eating their lunch, the bean counters in charge started to cut costs. One of the ways they did that was to slash editorial budgets. Content is content, they said. We can share content between papers. So that’s why you started seeing…

Have you ever been in one of those conversations where the person just talks AT you? They launch into a 15-minute monologue about their lives…while your eyes glaze over. Nothing – and I mean nothing – you do will give them the hint that enough is enough. Deadly. Much marketing is like that. Companies create ads that are all…

It’s official. My computer has absolutely no charm whatsoever. Yesterday it told me that Quicktime had failed to initialize, that my backup was out of date, and that my printer was not recognized. Last week it informed me that Chrome had crashed and that Firefox was not was responding. And last month it told me that Word had an…

I was shopping for bathroom tiles the other day. Now…that’s a product that has been transformed since I was a kid. I remember at one time you could have tiles in two sizes: four inch and six inch. Forget about nice designs. Just choose a color. But now… …now there are: Tiles that look like hardwood floors. Tiles that look like marble. Tiles…